London 2012: The first social Olympics?

Well, it’s possibly the world’s first social summer Olympics. Four years ago, Facebook had just 100 million users (and we thought that was big). Upstart Twitter was almost as small as the number of characters in a vintage non-media-enhanced tweet: six lonely millions.

Now the top Olympic athletes have more fans and followers than Twitter had users: NBA stars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant have 17 million and 14 million, respectively. Tennis stars Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are both around 11 million.

Before the London Games, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt had 7.6 million Twitter followers and Facebook fans; after his gold-medal Olympic record in the 100 meters, he’s up to well over 8.5 million.

That’s all in spite of London Olympic officials telling fans to stop tweeting and sharing to save wireless network bandwidth for TV crews. Of course, they can’t tell us what do on our sofas.

SEO.com put together the following infographic highlighting these and other “social games” stats: